THE CASE OF THE

OVERSIZE ACTOR

BY RICHARD GEHMAN

Despite the many impressive
technical strides forward it has made during the past few years,
television still sometimes deceives it viewers' eyes. No one looking
at Raymond Burr, the urbane, suave and apparently unruffled actor who is
now in his fourth season as Perry Mason on the CBS network, would be
likely to guess that he is a strange combination of humanitarian and
prankster, or that his real life has been one long series of heartbreaking
tragedies.

Few of Burr's friends know
anything about him. "There are some parts of my life I don't
talk about," he says. And that is that.

Burr's appearance on TV is
similarly deceptive. To those of us who sit marveling at Perry
Mason's adroitly legalistic mind, his Dan Beard sense of fair play, and
his singular ability to ward off the endless stream of attractive women
who keep flinging themselves at him, Burr appears to be nothing more than
a fairly tall, fairly well-built man.

In reality, Burr is built like
a massive inverted pyramid. He is 6 feet 2 1/2 inches tall, weighs
210 pounds and has shoulders so broad it would take Garry Moore quite a
while to circumnavigate him. His chest measures 48 1/2 inches
unexpanded and he wears a size 17 collar. If a talented great ape
were to climb Mount Rushmore and hack out a statue of himself, the result
would resemble the build of Raymond Burr. When I first met him
recently, my principal impression was of size disproportionate to that
which appears on the screen.

Without intending to compare
Burr to any great ape, living or dead, I can report that his present
impressive bulk is due solely to his own sculptural ability. Burr
attained his present shape through assiduous use of the hammer and chisel of self-control
and non-caloric cottage cheese.

Before becoming Perry mason, Burr's
customary role in feature length films was that of the heavy, and seldom
before had that synonym for villain been applied so precisely. When
he was discharged form the Navy after World War II, he scaled 340 pounds
and carried an additional weight of shame, for he had been plagued since
boyhood by taunts about his size.

Burr's outstanding characteristic is
his single-minded approach to any subject he takes up. He decided to
lose weight and turned to it with all his powers of concentration.
Shutting himself up in a flea-bag rooming house in Hollywood, he lived for
six months on 750 calories per day. He emerged weighing a trim 210
pounds.

Five years ago, when Burr's agent
Lester Salkow sent him to see Gail Patrick Jackson, the pretty ex-actress
who is executive producer of the Perry Mason series, Burr's weight
had gone up by 25 pounds. Mrs. Jackson was trying to get William
Holden to play the lead role. She saw Burr as Hamilton Burger, the
district attorney who would be defeated by Mason in court week after week.

Burr, who actually is about as
villainous as the late Joseph Welch, was wary of playing heavies. He
said he wished to test for the part of the hero and forthwith concentrated
on shedding the excess pounds his fondness for fine food had caused him to
gain.

Practically every available leading man
in Hollywood and a few from the East Coast went to test for Mason.
Finally it was Burr's turn.

In the projection room, watching
the test, the dynamic Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the character,
leaped to his feet and waved his arms exuberantly the instant he saw Burr.

"That's Perry Mason!"
he cried. How Gardner knew is a mystery that not even Perry mason
himself could solve, for in the 60-odd books that Gardner has written
about Mason, he has never bothered to describe his physical appearance.

Burr's suitability for the part
was apparent to the public from the beginning. The show gradually
climbed high in the rating and has managed to hover there.
Simultaneously, Burr began losing a little of himself as he fell
deeper and deeper into the characterization. People began shouting,
"Hi Perry!" at him wherever he went. When he is
fatigued--which is virtually all the time, for the Perry Mason part is one
of the most demanding in television--he has to catch himself when signing
autographs; he sometimes writes "Perry Mason" instead of his
real name.

Laslo Benedek, one of the
show's directors, told me that Burr's immersion in the part is all but
total. "He thinks as Perry and never stops," Benedek
said. "You can ask him at any given point in and mystery, 'How
much does Perry know now?' and he can tell you exactly, form the
character's point of view."

Burr disagreed.
"I've never managed to solve any of the cases until I read them
through," he declared. "In fact, I've often been
puzzled about who committed the crime after we finished shooting
the script."

Actually,
this is Burr's sense of humor bubbling up out of the huge body.
Although his customary expression is one of brooding contemplation, and
although his personality is veined prominently by streaks of altruism and humanity
(he was an indefatigable troop entertainer during the Korean conflict, and
he plans to devote his life after the Perry Mason series to working for
international peace), Burr also loves to laugh.

"As a handy-man actor who works in
all kinds of TV series," says Philip Ober, who has done four Perry
Mason shows, "I can honestly say this the happiest company in
Hollywood."

The company is so happy, in fact, that
it has become something of a problem to Art Marks, who shares the
producing responsibility with Arthur Seid. "Ray has a desire
for everybody to be happy, to be wanted and to belong," Marks
told me. "And this can backfire. He's too good to
people. The set becomes a country club. The technicians
aren't in there fighting to do their very best. They're too
happy."

Much of the time the crew is laughing
at Burr's practical jokes. In pulling them off he applies the same
determination that enabled him to lose weight. Most of them are
directed at Barbara Hale, who plays Della Street, Mason's secretary.

Miss Hale also is totally immersed in
her part; once, when one of her three small children was asked what she
did for a living, the child replied "She's a secretary."
Apart from being

an actress and mother, she also is
the best high-pitched screamer in Hollywood. The slightest surprise
causes her to jump three feet in the air, emitting an ear-splitting "Eeek!"

As soon as Burr found this out, he
began taking gull advantage of it. Once Miss Hale happened to
mention that she would like to have a little green plant for her dressing
room. Burr stared at her thoughtfully. The next day he gave
her a small plant. The day after that, another. Then
another. Finally he went to a florist, rented every plant in the
store, hired a truck and filled Miss Hale's dressing room before she
arrived for work. "It was a jungle!" she says today.
"I could get in only by crawling on my hands and knees."

Burr subsequently decided that Miss
Hale had not had enough green in her life. He spent an entire
evening cooking massive batches of lime gelatin dessert, took it to her
room and filled all the ash trays, glasses, cigarette boxes, pin trays and
other receptacles he could find.

Burr becomes equally methodical and
determined when he turns his mind to more serious matters. Last year
William Talman, who won the role of Hamilton Burger, was involved in a
major mess. Police invaded a party he was attending and arrested
Talman on a morals charge. CBS, invoking a standard clause in every
actor's contract that says his morals must be beyond reproach, suspended
Talman from the show before he was tried in court.

Burr was outraged. In conjunction
with Gail Patrick Jackson he immediately launched a campaign to get
justice for Talman. When a judge

threw the Talman case out of court,
thereby clearing him, and CBS still refused to reinstate him on the show,
Burr sent wires and letters to officials, begging them to
reconsider. In traveling around the country making personal
appearances he went out of his way to speak to officials of CBS affiliated
stations, asking them to bring pressure on the network. He
personally answered every letter he received protesting CBS's stand.

CBS remained stubborn. They
suggested that a fictitious election could be held on the show and a new
district attorney thus could plausibly take Talman's place.
"Nothing doing," Burr said. "We want Bill
back." He refused to let the studio personnel clean Talman's
belongings out of his dressing room, and he would not let them assign his
parking space to someone else. Each member of the cast and crew has
his own coffee cup, with his name on it, in an old-fashioned barbershop
rack. Burr insisted Talman's cup remain in its nook.

Finally, early last December, the
network relented and decided to let Talman return "for occasional
appearances." He was given a new contract. Talman himself
telephoned Burr to tell him the good news. Burr's bellow of
triumphant joy was like that of a bull elephant. The next day the
lot was plastered with "WELCOME HOME, BILL" signs, all ordered
personally by Burr.

The campaign and the signs were
typical. Raymond Burr's heart is in exact proportion to the size of
his body. His few close friends say it grew that way as a result of
the extraordinary series of hard-to-bear experiences he has gone through.